Recognise a Bootable Disk ?

Would anybody care to advise on a Hitachi hard disk that I recently acquired ?

My main question is 'Can I reformat the whole disk and will it still function normally ?' (assuming the disk is good). The context in which I ask this is explained a little more in the next paragraph.

The reason I ask is that the disk contains two partitions, one is unallocated and almost the whole disk, the other shows as 'System Reserved' and is 100MB. In the screenshots I show what in this partition.
Is this content typical of a bootable disk ?
If I erase it, e.g., by merging the partitions and reformatting, is anything bad likely to happen ? Can anyone tell me if I am likely to lose anything useful/valuable by doing this ? (other than if the answer to this last question is 'yes', I can safely afford to lose anything that's there.)

Dumb_Question
20.January.2014

 

Which version of Windows are you going to be using the Hitachi with? For the contents of the folder screenshot, it looks like XP which doesn't use BCD — it uses boot.ini. All of the other folders are boot language folders typical of Vista and 7.

How are you making the Hitachi bootable or is it already bootable?